Keywords

place, art, paintings, photographs, philosophy

Abstract

The concept of place, so intangible and yet embedded in all, remains a complicated and debated philosophical topic. What is place? Why are we drawn to certain places and averse to others? Why does a sense of home continue to feel so necessary to us – when there we are nurtured by it and when separated we long for it. Art works, places in themselves, provoke similar questions in us. We are drawn to certain works of art; they signify something to us in their being-in-the-world. Their place matters to us. Art is a place you can return (home) to. I chose to demonstrate art as place using photographs as the focal point of mixed-media panels. In photography, in a way unparalleled by the other visual arts, a moment in space and time is captured. In this depiction of a place, a new place is created. The collection of photographs were taken in Argentina, a foreign place I was inexplicably drawn to. For me, the sense of place within them is heightened. Can this sense be conveyed and shared? Each of us has our own places or works of art with an elevated place-ness. Addressed within the panels are issues such as individual connections to place, the museum and the place of the institution, meeting places, and the non-places of airports. I work through these topics with the help of philosophers such as Borges, Baudrillard and Casey, fiction writers and various artists.